So far working great on the Shield all channels have played so far ... channel changes are fast. Snappy UI no lags ... more commentary to follow will use it exclusively today going forward.

Haha, yeah, right........(will use it exclusively today going forward) . Me thinks you bounce from options to options, just to see what is different.

There is no DRM on the Shield so the only options is the piss poor HDHomerun native UI or this one that ... I can set specific channels to record (cannot do with HDHomerun ui) ... has a grid guide. I only use the Windows to watch the few DRM channels I have ... I mostly use the Shield because their support of Netflix and amazon is much better than Windows.

Being able to set Specific channels is what has me sold on it. I like to record syndicated shows that I want to keep in H264 less space used ... I can now do this.

@NYPlayer, what is your preferred client device that you are using this Kodi PVR?

I have it loaded on all ... but If I am going to sit down and enjoy a show on my Main entertainment system ... I use the Shield 2nd is my VIVOMINIPC. (7th-generation Intel Core i5-7400 processor (3.5GHz, 6M Cache)) ... Portable Viewing Google PIXEL-C Tablet.

I have removed all other units from my main entertainment system. At 1 time I had 7 different devices on my main System. The other devices are on various TV's around the house.

As far as recording and timeshifting liveTV there is no equal to the HDHomerun DVR ... even if you use this KODI App or the HDHomerun APP. ... I bitch and moan sometimes but the HDHomerun DVR I have found to be the very best for in house Viewing.

@NYPlayer, what is your preferred client device that you are using this Kodi PVR?

I have it loaded on all ... but If I am going to sit down and enjoy a show on my Main entertainment system ... I use the Shield 2nd is my VIVOMINIPC. (7th-generation Intel Core i5-7400 processor (3.5GHz, 6M Cache)) ... Portable Viewing Google PIXEL-C Tablet.

I have removed all other units from my main entertainment system. At 1 time I had 7 different devices on my main System. The other devices are on various TV's around the house.

As far as recording and timeshifting liveTV there is no equal to the HDHomerun DVR ... even if you use this KODI App or the HDHomerun APP. ... I bitch and moan sometimes but the HDHomerun DVR I have found to be the very best for in house Viewing.

Thank you for that informative information, (appears you have me out spent (throwing in the towel)).

Version 1.2.0 (Build 6415) Has been rock solid on my Shield and other Android devices... no problems changing channels .... watching Livetv etc...

@djp952 Thanks for your hard work and persistence on squashing the bugs !!!

JUST an FYI you should try this with the AMBER Skin looks great.

Woohoo! I was secretly dreading coming out here today to see what awful things I did to people's systems this time, but this is awesome news! I'd like to thank you (and everyone else) too, it's the feedback, suggestions, the willingness to test things out, and most importantly the patience everyone exercises that makes it fun to do and share. I'm an end user too, I benefit as much as anyone I just get to see it work first LOL.

It was the folks out here testing the ill-fated 1.2.0 test build (especially you sir) that led to me figuring out a different way to do that and really paying attention to how that was working on Android, and now I can use this Firestick I've had on a shelf forever as a fully-fledged Kodi box too. Win-win.

I'll check out that skin, I showed the Mrs. the screenshots and got an "ooooooo" - that's a grade-A top shelf show of support around here.

Hi all! I wanted to let you folks know that I have written a Kodi PVR Client for the HDHomeRun DVR service. I think it works pretty well and have been using it exclusively for a month or so now -- it has even gained the holy grail of "WAF" in our house. I had to dump Windows Media Center once and for all, and (sorry SD) we really didn't like the official HDHomeRun app/plugin options available to us.

This is different than the official Kodi HDHomeRun PVR Client -- this specifically works with the DVR service, and exposes as much of that back end as I deemed possible. If you don't subscribe to the DVR service or have older tuner device(s) that don't work with the DVR service -- this is not for you -- use the official Kodi HDHomeRun options available to you.

@djp952, why is this/your unofficial Kodi PVR Client for HDHomeRun DVR not discussed in the official Kodi community forums at kodi.tv? I've been a relativly active user on the Kodi community for years and I first learned about your PVR client addon today! Any chance that you could start a new forum thread for it there so more people in the official Kodi community at kodi.tv can get to know about it?

The only other PVR API client addon for HDHomeRun (which is called "HDHomeRun PVR native addon") is also an 'unofficial' PVR API client for Kodi and looking today it seems to be abandoned or at least development for it have stalled. Discussions of all HDHomeRun addons, unofficial or not, are of course more than welcomed on the official Kodi community forums at kodi.tv!

As you probably know, the official HDHomeRun for Kodi is a python script based addon which does not use Kodi's PVR API, and IMHO it sad that SiliconDust spends time/money on developing that addon for Kodi when it does not even use Kodi's own PVR API, as they will never have a real PVR addon for Kodi until they uses PVR API (which python addons cannot do today).

PS: Should note that I am not personally a subscriber of SiliconDust's HDHomeRun DVR service, and personally I would prefer if a PVR client addon for HDHomeRun could give me an option simply record/save the streams locally on my Kodi devices (direct attached USB harddrives on Linux and Android) without me having to setup a backend at all. As requested here => https://github.com/kodi-pvr/pvr.hdhomerun/issues/7

Hi! It's been brought up a number of times, submitting to Kodi that is. While I think my original reasoning probably doesn't hold much water any more, I'm still trepidacious about it. I kinda did things my own way and didn't follow their guidelines/rules (at all) and I've gone so far as to compile in my own versions of some libraries they use in Kodi (SQLite, cURL). It could be made to work within their guidelines, of course, but they would need to at least change how they build SQLite and tweak their cURL implementation to work right with the HDHomeRun RECORD engine. So there's that on the technical side. On the non-technical side, I honestly find them to be a bit too combative of a group, and that sucks all the fun out of it pretty quickly for me. I also feel that I can barely support the folks out here properly, suddenly having hundreds or even thousands of people to try and support might spiral into a deal-breaker -- there are only so many hours in a day

I am aware of at least one individual that attempted to jump-start development of the in-built Kodi addon again, but he was unsuccessful and met with resistance. I saw some of the feedback he received and it was disheartening to say the least.

I have an e-mail to respond to about the ability to record to disk from the PVR (sorry to the author for not responding yet - I'm getting to it - promise) as well. While I think it's outside of the scope of what I'm trying to do here, I've often wondered why Kodi doesn't implement that as part of the base software? All PVR addons (except maybe MythTV) just take data from somewhere and hand it off to Kodi. Kodi has the EPG data, it has access to all the channels, I don't think it would be too much of a stretch for it to include a generic DVR function that would work for everyone. If Kodi is running and it's 7:30pm, what stops it from tuning in channel 11 and saving the data to disk instead of displaying it?

This PVR could of course save files to disk just as easily, the complexity and scope problems come in with DVR scheduling. Standing up a service on Windows or Linux or Android are very different technically to implement, and there is a lot to consider to get it to do the right things at the right time. Certainly not impossible by any stretch, but I really think the way to go would be to do such a thing in Kodi itself - it has everything it needs to pull it off, maybe this hasn't occurred to them as a value-add yet? Dunno.

@djp952, why is this/your unofficial Kodi PVR Client for HDHomeRun DVR not discussed in the official Kodi community forums at kodi.tv?

...

It's been brought up a number of times, submitting to Kodi that is.

Cool, but I did not even think of the future steps of submitting your addons code upstream to mainline Kodi, as I only meant the first step of you starting a new discussion thread about this PVR client addon in the kodi.tv forums, just to start with in order to have spread the knowledge that this addon exists as an alternative. IMHO, having more active dicussions on improving all and any HDHomeRun addons for Kodi would benefit the kodi.tv community a lot.

You just creating a new forum thread at kodi.tv only to begin discussing your addon with the community there would go a long way too. Not only would you gain more testers for sure but maybe you would also again feedback and help from other developers of PVR client addon for Kodi, and support for the Kodi development team if you want to make requests of your own for core PVR API or GUI extentions in Kodi. Getting help from other developers with advice and then later maybe also with code via pull requests might make it more fun for you.

I kinda did things my own way and didn't follow their guidelines/rules (at all) and I've gone so far as to compile in my own versions of some libraries they use in Kodi (SQLite, cURL). It could be made to work within their guidelines, of course, but they would need to at least change how they build SQLite and tweak their cURL implementation to work right with the HDHomeRun RECORD engine. So there's that on the technical side.

I read in bits an pieces on kodi.tv that that the Kodi developerment team currently have plans to first move to an abstracted DB layer, like with example an ORM and ODBC, and then later they will also refactor Kodi's database schema. So now rather than later might be the right time to give them input on that first part as that might be what you would want to use to use the database differently, (while the second part if probably a couple of years away before users will see it). However as for tweaking cURL you would probabably be better of submitting a request for change directly upstream to the cURL project instead of to Kodi as I know they prefer to use vanilla libraries whenever possible, which is why Kodi developers themselves are for example active contributors to many different projects upstream from them, like FFmpeg and many more.

Anyway, personally when looking at all the pull requests and GitHub commits in Kodi mainline I do not find the majority developers in the Kodi team to be a combative of a group at all, to me they all seem to help each others and third-party developers. My impression is even that most developers in the official Kodi team do not 'hang-out' in the kodi.tv forums either, as to me it seems many of them only read their own threads or just some specific subforum(s) with create discussions and ignore much if not all of the general support requests from end-users, which they look to leave to the community and forum moderators to sort out for themselves. So there looks to be no presure for Kodi developers to perform according to user demand, and instead each developer only work on the parts they want and when they want it. Just like you, they are only in it for the fun of it, and yes maybe looking at the whole kodi.tv forums that might suck some of the fun out of it, and perhaps that is why many team Kodi developers look to ignore the support forums there as a whole and only post in the fun threads/subforums on occation. Internally it my belief that the official Kodi team themselves have fun working on upstream Kodi mainline totgether and a part from each other, and most communication that they have with each other much be going on outside of the public forums and instead be done in personal chat-rooms with only team members.

This PVR could of course save files to disk just as easily, the complexity and scope problems come in with DVR scheduling. Standing up a service on Windows or Linux or Android are very different technically to implement, and there is a lot to consider to get it to do the right things at the right time.

I would be happy with just a basic Live TV record function and timeshifting without scheduling myself. Only being able to pause Live TV and if I wanted to manually hit the record button to then and there start recording. It does not need to have any scheduling function at all to begin with. As I understand, that is also the limits that many new Smart TVs have today, where you can plugin a USB hardware to only add simple timeshifting and manual recording ability, without scheduling ability. And that alone would make my wife as well as my parents very happy.

OK ... posting to kodi.tv notwithstanding, let's talk through how we might envision a record-to-disk feature working Prepare for rambling!!

The record button in the Kodi player adds a timer, similar to right-clicking in the EPG and selecting 'Record'. If there is no detected RECORD engine (or we add an option or something), the code could be smart enough to decide that this is going to be a "local" recording and for simplicity's sake kicks off a new stream in the background from the tuner and writes it to disk. Seems reasonable so far, and would also allow a right-click record in the EPG to work too, for currently airing programming of course. If it's streaming in the background, how is it going to know when to stop?

We'd have to probably carve out a fake folder under Recorded TV like "Local Recordings" or something to tuck the file(s) away since they won't be played back over HTTP they will need to use the in-built Kodi file APIs rather than the streaming code. I'm going to assume that Kodi would be cool with a raw mpeg-ts file, I see no reason it wouldn't be, so that shouldn't be a roadblock. File naming shouldn't be too hard, we could re-enable temp storage of the 4-hour guide data (but not tell Kodi since that causes lock-ups), which should give us all the metadata we'd need to give the file(s) reasonable names. Could also solve the issue of knowing when to stop, if we know the current program information we'll have the end time.

But this wouldn't let you time-shift the channel you're playing at all, it would be a separate thing. You'd have to stop, go into Recorded TV and access it like a video file. We also have the problem of what happens if you close Kodi, everything will up and die. Nothing we can do about that if it's part of the PVR client, so let's ignore that problem!

Time-shifting as I understand you're looking for, let's think about that. When you hit record in the player, we would probably need to quickly pause playback, switch the stream over to disk and resume playback from there, ideally in the same place where it was (perhaps a few frames off is OK?) and fast enough so Kodi won't think the stream died. Ouch. Now we're getting into why the HDHomeRun RECORD engine exists -- it streams everything to disk and plays back from there so you can do time-shifting. Going THAT far would be crazy when perfectly reasonable existing solutions exist.

Time-shifting may be off the table without a simpler implementation suggestion; it's feeling far too complex to work into the existing PVR client. Perhaps a different client that always streams to a temporary file (like Media Center) would work out better, this client is designed to use the services provided by the HDHomeRun system.

So I'm thinking maybe we could do something to record what you are playing, or even record any current channel content for that matter without the RECORD engine to help us and tuck them away in a folder, but I'm not sold on the value it adds when the RECORD engine is available from SiliconDust. You could install the RECORD engine on the same machine that has Kodi on it and get so many more benefits. You could configure it to store the files wherever you want (I think), it handles all the time-shift buffering and scheduling, you can still press Record in Kodi and get a legit recorded file, it's so much more elegant. Is the subscription cost the hang-up?

Anyway, there's my 10 minutes of rambling I'm not feeling it right now, but perhaps you can come up with some better suggestions on how it might be made to work more simply and have the value you're looking for? Anything we might actually try also shouldn't be so grandeous that it would deter people from buying into the HDHomeRun DVR solution, I want to be an enabler for folks but I also want to be a advocate for SiliconDust, they are the reason we're here -- it's all possible because of the work they've put in and have been gracious enough to document and keep open so that others can use it.

Wow that was a lot ... exactly what would be the benefit of creating a DVR built in to KODI ? they already have 5 or 6 different PVR's that you can use ... I personally do not see the benefit. Is it to be able to create a free option ? .... and how is this going to help the growth of the HDHomerun DVR ? ... or are you talking about a DVR that will use the HDHOmerun View guide data etc ... and be able to record locally without subscribing to the DVR ?